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What if you could tap into your inherent resilience at any time? Prentis Hemphill guides a meditation to turn good memories into a state of resilience.
How To Do This Practice:
- Get Comfortable in Your Body: Find a position, seated, standing, or lying down, that feels right. Move, shake, or sound out anything that helps you arrive in your body.
- Conjure a Resilient Memory: Call to mind a moment, place, or experience that makes you feel strong, creative, or connected, something that reminds you of your resilience.
- Let It Fill You Up: Notice where that memory lives in your body, and let it expand into your arms, legs, face, and breath until it energizes your whole being.
- Turn It Up: Amplify the sensation by 20%, letting it spill through your muscles and cells. Notice shifts in breath, posture, and energy.
- Turn It Down: Gently reduce the sensation, bit by bit, and observe what changes. What stories re-emerge, how your body responds, and how you make that shift.
- Carry It With You: Return to the present moment with the option to bring that resilience with you at the volume and intensity you need, knowing it’s always available.
Today’s Happiness Break Guide:
PRENTIS HEMPHILL is the founder of the Embodiment Institute, and a writer and therapist who prioritizes the body in their approach to healing.
Learn More About the Embodiment Institute: https://www.theembodimentinstitute.org/about
Check out Prentis’ website: https://prentishemphill.com
Follow Prentis on Twitter: https://twitter.com/prentishemphill
Follow Prentis on Instagram: https://tinyurl.com/4d99f4xs
Related Happiness Break episodes:
Make Uncertainty Part of the Process: https://tinyurl.com/234u5ds7
Pause to Look at the Sky: https://tinyurl.com/4jttkbw3
A Self-Compassion Meditation For Burnout: https://tinyurl.com/485y3b4y
Related Science of Happiness episodes:
How Holding Yourself Can Reduce Stress: https://tinyurl.com/2hvhkwe6
Breathe Away Anxiety: https://tinyurl.com/3u7vsrr5
Are You Remembering the Good Times: https://tinyurl.com/483bkk2h
Follow us on Instagram: @ScienceOfHappinessPod
We’d love to hear about your experience with this practice! Share your thoughts at happinesspod@berkeley.edu or use the hashtag #happinesspod.
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Transcription:
DACHER KELTNER: I’m Dacher Keltner, and this is Happiness Break. Today we’re trying a practice where we cultivate a sense of resilience by tapping into an empowering memory.
When we reminisce on the good we feel more resilient. Namely stressful situations don’t drag our mood down as much, and our cortisol levels don’t spike as much, either.
Resilience is also connected with longevity, lower depression rates, and more satisfaction with life.
This week’s Happiness Break on resilience is hosted by Prentis Hemphill, a writer, the founder of The Embodiment Institute, and a therapist who prioritizes the body in their approach to healing.
PRENTIS HEMPHILL: Hi everyone. This is Prentis Hemphill and I’m offering a resilience practice today.
Resilience is really our birthright. It’s what we come into the world with. It’s where creativity comes from. It’s where our relationality comes from. And so this practice is about resourcing ourselves, accessing resilience, and the experience of resilience whenever we might need it.
So I wanna ask you, to get into a position that’s comfortable for your body, and that can be standing, it can be seated, it can be lying down. If you need to move around, if you need to shake, if you need to let out a sound, if you need to dance a little bit so that your body arrives, go ahead and do that. You don’t need to be calm and still to engage in this practice.
We are finding our way into our bodies, and that can look like a bunch of different ways.
So while we’re here, I want you to think about something that brings you a sense of resilience. This can be a special place in nature or something you do creatively. It could be laughing with your friends, it could be dancing, whatever image you have, whatever experience you have, I want you to just conjure it in this moment.
Once you have that memory or that place or that moment, let it start to fill you up.
So if it’s seated in your center and your gut, or if it’s in your heart, let that memory spread.
Let it fill up your arms, your legs, your face. Really be there. See that. Experience it.
When you are in this place, when you’re experiencing resilience, what’s your face like?
What’s your throat like? What’s your chest like? What are your legs doing? Let it come alive in you.
And then I want you to take this experience that you’re having and turn it up. Turn it up 20%.
Whatever it is for you, turn that experience up to where it’s almost spilling out of you.
Invite the experience even more into your muscles, into your cells. Notice how your breathing changes, how your position shifts.
And now I actually wanna ask you to turn it down. Turn it down maybe 10% and just notice how you do that.
What changes? What comes back into view? What stories might be there? How does your body position change?
And you can turn it down even more really, so the experience is kind of off.
Bring yourself back to approximately where we began this practice.
There may be residue from that experience. Or you may have arrived all the way back. Just notice the difference and notice, especially, that you did that. Whatever change happened was one that you made happen.
You invited that experience in.
And so for this next round, we’re gonna conjure that experience again, that resilience.
As you think about your day ahead of you, the day you’ve had already, how much space do you want that experience to take up in this moment? And just take a second and fill yourself up with it.
Keep letting it shift your body. Keep letting it move your actual body. If you wanna shake, if you wanna let out a sound now, a wiggle, whatever you need to do, but let that fill you up to the degree that you need it today.
And we’ll move towards closing out the practice. But you get to keep that exactly where you need it. And the reminder here is that this is always accessible to us.
That experience is always a resource that can shift your mood, shift your breath, shift your way of being. And lastly, that resilience is our birthright. So it’s from this place we can live, we can let go of the doubt, the guilt, the stories, the ways of the world shapes our bodies, and we can shape our bodies back through our experiences of life that fill us up.
Thanks so much.
DACHER KELTNER: That was Prentis Hemphill, writer, therapist, and the founder of The Embodiment Institute.
I’m Dacher Keltner, Thanks for taking this Happiness break with me.
Happiness Break is produced by PRX and UC Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center.
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